Dealers Buying Again At Impressionist Sales

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 10, 1994

There's been a sea change in the market for Impressionist and modern art. At this week's auctions, which ended last night at Christie's, buyers tended to be either serious connoisseurs or dealers. Gone are the days of impulse buying. Gone, too, is a market so inflated that dealers and old-time collectors were priced out.

Almost half the works sold last night were bought by dealers. At Sotheby's on Tuesday night, dealers snapped up 25 percent of the sale.

"Obviously in some cases dealers were buying for clients," said Christopher Burge, chairman of Christie's in New York. "But often they were buying for stock." The ratio of dealers to collectors buying is closer to what it was before the boom of the 1980's.

Both sales were packed with the usual international crowd of collectors and dealers. At each, when a work was of good quality and hadn't been on the market recently, bids leapfrogged across the salesroom.

Christie's was by far the most successful. The sale totaled $37.5 million, less than the auction house's estimate of $42.4 million to $57 million. Of the 57 works offered, 44 found buyers. At Sotheby's on Tuesday night, 46 works were offered and 29 found buyers. Sotheby's sale totaled $25.8 million, far below its estimate of $31 million to $43 million.

The reason for Christie's success was simple: estate property. "This auction was a confirmation that keeping sales small and turning away works that were not fresh to the market produced strong results," Mr. Burge said.

Michael Findlay, the director of Impressionist and modern art for Christie's in New York, said he had no idea the mid-range works would do as well they did. "But you can never predict the top end," he said.

Nobody at Christie's last night could have imagined that prices for some works would double and even triple the estimates. When Toulouse-Lautrec's "Dancer Adjusting Her Tights (Her First Pair of Tights)," an 1890 pastel, went up for sale, six bidders fought long and hard for it. Gasps could be heard in the salesroom as bids rose slowly but steadily. The pastel was finally sold to a unidentified telephone bidder for $4.7 million. (Final prices include the auction house's commission, 15 percent of the first $50,000 and 10 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Another prized work, Picasso's "Composition," a 1934 pen-and-ink drawing of "the artist" reclining with Marie-Therese Walter, his lover, was expected to bring $300,000 to $400,000. Three bidders battled it out, and the room burst into applause when the drawing finally sold for $992,500 to an unidentified private American collector.

A Magritte also fetched a surprising price. It was "The Echo Chamber" (1958), a classic image of a gigantic apple filling a room. Estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, it sold for a whopping $937,500.

The Magritte was sold from the estate of Alice Tully, the New York philanthropist. So was the painting with the highest estimate, a Monet "Waterlilies." Done in 1907 in Giverny, this round picture in soft pastels is one of four round waterlily paintings done by the artist. Because round paintings are often hard to sell, Christie's recently reframed the picture in a square frame. The work was expected to bring $4 million to $6 million. It sold for $3.3 million to an unidentified collector who was bidding by phone.

"Certainly the fact that it was a different shape decreased the number of potential buyers," Mr. Findlay said. "But in the overall scheme of things, $3 million is a high price these days."

In a tug of war, both Sotheby's and Christie's offered the Tully estate a guarantee. (A guarantee is an agreed-upon minimum price paid by the auction house to the seller. If the art does not sell, it becomes property of the auction house.) Christie's clearly made the better offer.

Other works from the Tully estate performed well, too. Boudin's "Venice, Customs House,"(1895) sold to an unidentified telephone bidder for $195,000, nicely above its $120,000 to $160,000 estimate.

But the evening had its flops. Renoir's "Grenouillere," was estimated at $3 million to $4 million, but nobody was willing to pay more than $2 million. The painting is one a series from around 1871-72 of a popular bathing and boating spot on the Seine known as La Grenouillere, or frog pond.

The auction house also offered financing to the heirs of William S. Paley, the founder of CBS, who died three years ago. The heirs were selling Corot's "Studio (Young Woman in a Pink Dress, Seated Before an Easel and Holding a Mandolin)." Estimated at $1.8 million to $2.2 million, it sold for $1.4 million to an American collector.

Another big-name estate, that of Blanchette Rockefeller, was selling Brancusi's "Kiss," a small sculpture executed in Paris in 1907-08. Estimated at $900,000 to $1.2 million, it sold for $882,500 to the Fuji TV Gallery in Tokyo, bidding for Yanichiro Ishibashi, a private collector who is the son of the founder of Bridgestone Museum, the leading museum of Western art in Tokyo.

Works that sold well at Christie's last night hadn't been around the auction rooms for years. Sotheby's sale the night before was riddled with stale material: nearly a fourth of the works offered had been put up for auction in the last 10 years, and many others either carried estimates that were too high or were simply not top quality.